93% of online buyers would be encouraged to buy more products if free shipping were offered.

By offering free shipping, you can increase conversions as well as the size of your orders. Check out this article from Web Marketing Today for some great advice on how you can offer free shipping to your customers.

In the Oneupweb consumer study, 95.5% of respondents cited clearly stated pricing and shipping information as an influential factor in making a purchase decision. Don’t be a victim!

Make sure a product’s price is clearly stated, whether on your homepage or on the product page itself.

If at all possible, try to calculate taxes and shipping when products are added to the cart so your shoppers know the final price before they ever get to checkout.

Conversion Tip #3: Referral Discounts

Test #1

Optimizely tested a call to action (CTA) for an outdoor gear retailer’s refer-a-friend program and found that active outdoor enthusiasts are significantly more motivated by “Earn Rewards” than “Get Rewards.”

In the case above, “Earn $25. Invite Friends,” increased program engagement from the baseline, “Invite a Friend. Get $25,” by 60%.

The lesson? Offer referral discounts, and while you’re at it, test different ways of presenting the offer. They work, obviously, but they can still be optimized.

Test #2

Or take a tip from Airbnb and offer a product credit in return for referrals.

The new program encourages users to invite their friends by offering them cash credits to be used towards future Airbnb bookings.

According to Courtney Boyd Myers, writing for thenextweb, Airbnb got good results from the program.

Airbnb first tested the new referral program in a hugely successful closed-beta program of 2,161 existing members, which brought in 2,107 new members, nearly a 1:1 ratio of community goodness.

Conversion Tip #4: Add Reviews and Ratings

Figleaves ran an experiment to see how product reviews and ratings affected conversion rates. They found that products with reviews had a 12.5% higher conversion rate than products without reviews.

More importantly, the conversion rate for the same product—after adding reviews—was 35.27% higher than it was before adding reviews.

They also found that the number of reviews mattered a lot. Products with 20 or more reviews had a whopping 83.85% higher conversion rate than those without.

Conversion Tip #5: Take Your Email Marketing Beyond the Inbox

Over the next few years, we’re likely to see a lot more ecommerce companies combining their email marketing campaigns with related social advertising.

In a study where a leading retailer in the US targeted 925,000 email subscribers with both its regular emails and coordinated Facebook ads, subscribers who received both ads were 22% more likely to make purchases than those who only received emails.

The potential of what you could do with this strategy is mind-boggling.

Imagine a customer purchasing a product online, then finding an advert on Facebook five minutes later with a popular upsell product. If they don’t buy the upsell, you could then send them an email with a discount on that specific upsell product.

Wishpond has written about how to set up these kind of adverts, along with strategic ideas to experiment with in this post.

That helps soon-to-be customers get more comfortable with making a purchase, thereby boosting both your revenue and your conversion rate.

In fact Salesforce.com recently added an explainer video to its homepage and increased conversion rates by 20%. Approximately 30% of visitors watch the video and approximately 50% of those viewers watch the video in its entirety.

Conversion Tip #9: Increase Urgency

There’s a reason why urgency is last in this list. All the points above must be in place before urgency will work.

Adding urgency doesn’t work if your offer is full of distractions, or if your value proposition is crap. It won’t work if your offer’s irrelevant to your audience, or if your audience doesn’t trust you.

Below are two variations that I tested on the offer’s landing page. As you’ll notice, the only difference is that one communicates urgency and how many packages have been bought, where the other does not.

Variation A:

Variation B:

This is one of the most impactful A/B test I’ve ever run. The conversion rate of variation B was almost 3x that of variation A.

Here’s what happened to our conversion rate as we gradually rolled out variation B to all users. Our conversion rate went from ~3.5% to ~10%.

Since running this campaign two years ago, I’ve become fascinated by the power of urgency, and I’ve found multiple ways to integrate it into my strategy—boosting blog traffic, online sales, and engagement.

Conclusion

By implementing each of the tips above, not only will you see an increase in sales, conversions, revenue, and profit, you’ll build a reputable brand for your products and services.

Whether you’re offering free shipping or discounts, adding reviews or adding a security badge, you’ll see more consistent profit levels—which will allow you to continue to scale and grow your business.

Does a particular ecommerce experience stand out for you? If you’ve had a smooth, hassle-free experience that made you want to order again, I’d love to hear about it. Please tell us about your experience in the comments.